All In The Game

To Cia Turncoat Aldrich Ames, Surrendering His Fellow Agents To Gulags And Even Death Was . . .

March 07, 1997|By Michael Kilian, Washington Bureau.

LANGLEY, Va. — Aldrich Ames is still playing The Game. His home is now a cell at the Allenwood Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. It has been three years since the turncoat counterspy was caught and caged in the biggest spy scandal in CIA history.

The traitor who sold out his country for some $4 million in Russian blood money--who singlehandedly wiped out the United States' top echelon of agents in Moscow at the climax of the Cold War--has confessed to his crimes and is serving a sentence of life imprisonment with no chance of parole.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published March 8, 1997:Corrections and clarifications.A photo caption in Friday's Tempo section transposed the names of Jean Vertefeuille and Sandy Grimes and had the wrong first name for Dan Payne. The Tribune regrets the error.

But he continues to carry on as though it were just a losing round in "Spy vs. Spy."

"He's justifying himself all the time," said Jeanne Vertefeuille, the CIA counterintelligence operative who led the agency team that tracked down Ames. "It's a lot of baloney and people seem to buy it. He doesn't realize the basic difference is that he's alive and all those people are dead."

Ames' bargain with the KGB led to the swift execution of 10 high-ranking Soviets working for the U.S. But not all his victims died. Fifteen or so were merely imprisoned, beaten and tortured.

Kremlin arms control expert Vladimir Potashov was one of them. He spent seven years in Russia's last gulag thanks to Ames, surviving horrible conditions, brutal treatment and several brushes with death.

"Ames is in nothing like gulag," said Potashov, grimly.

Public attention has returned to the man reviled as one of the century's greatest scoundrels, occasioned by the third anniversary of his denouement, recent revelations concerning the work of the CIA sleuths who caught him, and the publication of a new book on the Ames case, Pete Earley's "Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames" (Putnam).

But Ames doesn't shrink from the spotlight. The Russian mole, who once happily accepted a jail-cell hug from a woman network correspondent during an exclusive interview after his arrest, is still courting and manipulating the news media. Trying to alter public perceptions if no longer actual events, he depicts his treachery as just another cloak-and-dagger gambit.

He protested to ABC's Ted Koppel, in one of two recent "Nightline" programs devoted to the Ames anniversary, that he did not give up his country:

"No," he said. "No significant damage to our national security interests occurred. Tremendous damage was done to the agency's institutional framework, the agency's operations and, most importantly, to an awful lot of people."

Potashov will attest to this. His friends were dragged off by the KGB. His whole family suffered and he lost his first wife to a KGB-induced divorce.

According to Vertefeuille and her colleague Sandy Grimes, the CIA desk officer who suspected Ames as a mole from the beginning, the turncoat also informed on or compromised hundreds of American agents or sources all over the world. Interviewed at CIA headquarters in Langley, the two said it may be years before the final assessment is made of the damage Ames caused.

But Ames, presenting himself as just another of the agency's liberal critics, suggests that the damage he did to America's principal intelligence agency may have been good for it.

"Espionage services should be relatively small," he said on "Nightline." "They should be relatively weak. They should be relatively poor. They should not be autonomous bureaucratic establishments with their own turf to protect, their own agenda to carry out."

Waiting for a deal

Like a character in a John le Carre or Graham Greene novel, Ames lives in the belief that his Russian friends will yet come to his rescue.

"He still has this hope," said Potashov, who now lives in South Carolina. "It is always in his mind that when the Russians get some big American spy or several of them he will be exchanged--that that's how he will get out. It helps him to survive."

"Certainly that's probably one of the things that keeps him going," said Vertefeuille, whom Ames and the KGB tried to frame for his misdeeds to keep the CIA off his trail. "There have been prisoner exchanges, during the Cold War. I have no inside scoop whether it might happen again. It would depend on too many political factors. That would be something for the White House and the Kremlin. It's not decided within the intelligence services."

Earley, who conducted many hours of interviews with Ames as well as his KGB handlers in Moscow for his book, said that Ames remains an almost beloved figure in the Kremlin because he was the KGB's greatest success in The Game. The Russians want to help him, he said.

"They told me they didn't have anyone to trade," Earley said in an interview. "If they'd kept (Gen. Dmitri) Polyakov (a valued U.S. agent executed by the KGB), then they'd have somebody to trade. They were apologetic to me how they handled the Ames case. The message they wanted to get back to him was, `We screwed up. We know that. We're sorry. We're interested in helping you in any way we can, if we can figure out a way to do it.' "